Book Buddy

There is a market gap for a mobile app that offers purchasing and selling books seamless

India has seen a substantial increase in the demand for pre- owned text books owing to increasing literacy in the nation and rising focus on education.The India second hand books market is projected to rise at a CAGR of 5.4% over decade.

In 2022 , pre-owned book shipments in India accounted for 31.1% of the global second hand books market value.

Consumption of second hand medical books and second hand engineering books is expected to see a hikeover the

forecast period as the focus on education bolsters in the nation.

Used book sales are increasing due to an increased focus on education and literacy around the globe in recent years. This results in an increase in the overall number of readers, creating a greater demand for used books.

Overview

“Book Buddy” offers number of benefits to both buyers and sellers. A few of them are:

• A wide range of books: It has a wide range of used books, from popular fiction to rare and collectible editions.

• A simple and intuitive interface: Its simple and intuitive interface makes it easy for users to browse, search, and list books.

• Quality assurance: It scrutinizes each book before listing and categorizes them, so that users can buy them while being assured of their quality and pricing.

• A secure and convenient payment system: It has secure and convenient payment system makes it easy for buyers and sellers to complete transactions.

Target Audience

This app can serve users from diverse backgrounds who are interested in purchasing used books. However, for the MVP, we have chosen a primary user base with the following traits:

1. Age Group — 15–60 years

2. Demography- Urban/Semi-Urban

3. Profession — Students and Frequent readers

4. Technical Literacy — Intermediate and above

5. Language — English

Hypothesis

Prior to commencing our project, we formulated a set of hypotheses to establish the groundwork for our research.

• Most people tend to favor older books over newer ones due to their affordability and suitability for their intended purpose.

• People are interested in purchasing old books, especially if they appear to be in new or at least good condition.

• People prefer online platforms over physical bold book stores.

Empathize

With an attempt to understand user’s needs, pain points and goals, we did secondary and primary research.

Secondary Research

I undertook secondary research across diverse online resources, scrutinizing market trends, user inclinations, and existing products. This helps our application to align with established market trends and benchmarks.

SWOT Analysis

User Surveys and Findings

About 73% of our user is from age group 15-35 years

Out of our userbase 50% of individuals are college going students and around 41% of them are working in private sector.

56% of the users would use an online shopping platform, at least a few days a month. While roughly 28% users use them more frequently(weekly or daily).

Biggest frustration among used book buyers are :
Difficulty finding specific books
Poor quality or inaccurate book descriptions
Scams or fraud

Condition of books, Price, Version of books and quality of pages and print are the most important factors that people consider while buying used books.

If books are offered at low price, people can ignore version and print quality of books to some extent.

Most of the individuals prefer using UPI or COD as their primary mode of payment for online shopping.

People want books feature for book reviews, recommendation, and wish listing features to be included.

Feature Analysis

Card Sorting

Bhumit, 19, Gurugram

Personas

To keep different types of users at center of our design process, I made four user personas. Here’s one of them:

Ideation

I have collected comprehensive information about the project and synthesized it to extract meaningful insights. Using this information, we engaged in Brain Dump and Idea Wall activities, aiming to generate numerous solutions for each How Might We (HMW).

While all these ideas address specific problems, not all of them are feasible. Considering factors such as cost, complexity, urgency, and value delivered, we prioritized and selected the ones to incorporate into our final product.

Prioritization Matrix

Here’s the prioritization matrix that helped us classify possible features depending upon Effort and Impact.

Now that we have a clear idea of what features do need to include in the application to solve various user needs and pain point, we can move the the penultimate stage, i.e. design.

Design

In this stage, we took ideas generated during ideation phase and used them to create wireframes first.

Low Fidelity wireframes

These are hand made wireframes that give us a basic skeleton on the application and are highly time efficient. We can make multiple iterations of these screens to reach an optimal point. Here are a few examples of hand made wire frames.

High Fidelity wireframes

Link to my figma file:- https://www.figma.com/file/Lhmag5URJ7n01yV5T68TN1/BOOK-BUDDY?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=qbtHNSWVHOhDTVum-1